Ruby Jackson Gonzalez

Ruby Jackson Gonzalez is a Norfolk businesswoman and former CIA operative who becomes a key member of CURE, the secret U.S. organization led by Harold W. Smith. At first she is an outsider who knows too much about CURE; over time she becomes an organizer, field investigator and trusted ally to Remo Williams and Chiun.

Ruby builds a successful wig business in Norfolk, buying hair from sailors. The novels also recall her childhood in New York, including a frightening night when five-year-old Ruby wandered near a cemetery and her grandmother brought her home. By twenty-two she is sharp enough to recognize that a government job paying unusually well is CIA work despite its cover story. She serves for three years before her assignment ends and she is sent to Baqia.

Ruby’s confidence has a history: at sixteen, a school friend lured her into an attempted sexual assault. Ruby used her brother’s gun in self-defense and killed one attacker. The story helps explain her readiness to protect herself, while the novels later show her turning that same independence toward CURE work.

In Baqia, Ruby is drawn into the regime’s effort to obtain a dangerous device. Corazon asks her to drug Remo and Chiun; she refuses, is charged with treason and imprisoned. During her escape, she helps guide the two men out of the prison. The CIA dismisses her afterward. Smith remembers that she saved Remo and Chiun. When he considers killing her because she knows CURE exists, Ruby turns that knowledge into leverage and bargains for a place inside the organization.

Ruby’s work soon exceeds a secretary’s. She handles routine CURE business, lightens Smith’s workload and makes him take time off; Remo jokes that she spaces out his assignments and he cannot withstand her voice. She also negotiates CURE contracts and can assign Remo and Chiun to a job.

Ruby also proves her fieldcraft outside CURE’s office. While checking a mayor’s security, she slips into his building and apartment, demonstrates how easily his car could be sabotaged, and reports that his bodyguards and locks offer little protection. In a separate Lippincott investigation, she follows the trail to the Lifeline laboratory, where Dr. Gladstone captures her. Ruby frees herself from restraints and kills Gladstone with a scalpel.

Ruby’s family remains part of her life. When her brother Lucius is abducted and forced to work with other captives, she helps Chiun free them and tells their mother that Lucius is coming home. Later, when Smith orders Remo to kill her for trying to leave CURE, Remo calls her a friend because she once saved him and Chiun. Ruby goes to Newark, where she has relatives, rather than return to Norfolk, which she expects Smith to search first.

Her mother lives in the apartment above the shop, preferring her old Norfolk friends to the mansion Ruby offers outside town. Ruby remains close enough to bring her good news directly; the books also show Chiun trying to recruit Ruby as the mother of a child he could train with Remo. Ruby declines his offers, and the narration presents their mutual confidence as flirtation rather than an established relationship.

During a Newark tenement fire, Ruby disappears while her aunt Lettie survives. Remo later finds a clue in Ruby’s wig box and realizes she staged her death and is alive. Much later, Smith refers to Ruby as having perished under mysterious circumstances. That later account gives no details and does not explain when or how she died.

A photographed letter offered for sale as Warren Murphy’s correspondence says Ruby was based on a real person known to the writer and Dick Sapir. It connects that person’s departure from their lives with writing Ruby out of the novels. The person is unnamed, no book is identified, and the photograph has not independently authenticated the seller’s attribution. The letter supplies an account of the character’s inspiration, rather than identifying a real-life counterpart or explaining her fictional fate.